Chess-playing Fellows of Royal Society

[Gordon Cadden]

... If the weather is too cold or too rainy, I take refuge in the Regency Café. I like to watch the games of chess. The best chess players in the world are in Paris, and the best players in Paris are in the Regency Café. Here, in Rey's establishment, they battle it out--Legal the Profound, Philidor the Subtle, Mayot the Solid. One sees the most surprising moves and hears the stupidest remarks. For one can be an intelligent man and a great chess player, like Legal, but one can also be a great chess player and a fool, like Foubert and Mayot...

http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks07/0700101h.html

Believe that is a quote from Deschapelles

[Mike Truran]

Diderot.

[John McKenna]

Thanks to Gordon C for the prompt and to Mike T for that timely reminder.

Alexandre Deschapelles (1780-1847) could have quoted Dennis Diderot (1713-1784) - a bit like the modern habit of retweeting right, left and centre.

Read more about the effect Diderot had -

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diderot_effect

Beware of the contamination of sudden wealth. The poor man may take his ease without thinking of appearances, but the rich man is always under a strain

I suspect the same applies to chess - the more grading/rating points you have to lose the more the strain of keeping up appearances

NB: Diderot was passed over for membership of the Académie française.

[John Upham]

Here is perhaps a less well-known chess playing FRS :

Charles Tomlinson

https://chessbookchats.blogspot.com/201 ... areer.html

and

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_T ... scientist)

The first article has FRS whereas the second has "member".

[Christopher Kreuzer]

Since the 'academics known to play chess' seem to go here, I am putting another one here,

Paul Vinogradoff

Sir Paul Gavrilovitch Vinogradoff (1854-1925) was a Russian and British historian and medievalist.

He was born in the Russian Empire, studied in Germany, settled in England.

I came across a mention of him in an article from 1960 by F. F. Russell (Rhodes Scholar) who stated that there was an 'author photo' in one of Vinogradoff's books showing him at a chessboard. He played for Oxford City Chess Club and for the County of Oxfordshire and regularly competed in the city championships.

He died in 1925, so no-one now alive will have a living memory of him but I wonder if anyone heard secondhand about him from others?

Chessgames claim to have four games by him under the name 'Paul Vinogradov':

https://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessplayer?pid=81095

Not sure if this is the same person. A win in a correspondence game against Alekhine (apparently this is actually Alekhine's elder brother)?

And I see that Tim Harding has written a bit about Vinogradoff / Vinogradov in his thesis:

"He beat the future world champion Alexander Alekhine 2 -0 in the 7th Shakmatnoe Obozrenie postal tournament 1903-4 (Alekhine was
only about eleven years old then) but lost at least one of their games in the 17 th S.O. tournament that began in November 1909."

Have people used this as a Morphy Number route?

[Christopher Kreuzer]

And Andrei Markov (of Markov chain fame) was a chess player.

According to the author on page 479 of Probability and Statistics by Example: Volume 2, Markov Chains: A Primer in Random Processes and Their Applications, Markov played in one of the cable matches that took place in the First World War (this is the Moscow versus Oxford match in 1916):

Andrey A Markov vs Paul Vinogradov 1-0

1.e4 e6 2.d4 d5 3.Nc3 Nf6 4.Bg5 dxe4 5.Nxe4 Nbd7 6.Nf3 Be7 7.Nxf6+ Nxf6 8.c3 O-O 9.Bd3 b6 10.Qc2 h6 11.h4 Bb7 12.O-O-O Nd5 13.Bh7+ Kh8 14.Be4 f5 15.Bxe7 Qxe7 16.Ne5 Kh7 17.Bf3 c5 18.dxc5 bxc5 19.Rhe1 Rad8 20.g3 Nf6 21.Bxb7 Qxb7 22.f3 Qc7 23.Rxd8 Rxd8 24.g4 Rd5 25.f4 Ne4 26.gxf5 Rxe5 27.fxe5 exf5 28.Rxe4 fxe4 29.Qxe4+ Kg8 30.Qd5+ Kf8 31.h5 Ke7 32.Kd2 Qb6 33.b3 a5 34.Qd6+ Qxd6+ 35.exd6+ Kxd6 36.Kd3 g5 37.hxg6

Not quite sure why that is described as a "beautiful example" of a game, but it seemed suitable to put here (Vinogradov is the Vinogradoff mentioned in the previous post).